Factor Structure of the Affective Style Questionnaire in Flemish Adolescents

Abstract

Emotion regulation plays an important role in both healthy and problematic adolescent psychological functioning. Emotion regulation tendencies can be assessed with the Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ; Hofmann & Kashdan, 2010), but its validity in Dutch speaking adolescents has not been investigated so far. Two methods, namely traditional confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the recently developed exploratory structural equations modeling (ESEM), were compared to examine the dimensional structure of the ASQ in a Flemish adolescent sample (N = 1,601). Although, as expected, the ESEM-model fit the data better than the CFA-model, the fit indices indicated that both models did not have an acceptable fit. With a shortened version of the ASQ, model fit improved substantially, but only the ESEM solution provided a good fit. The ESEM results support the use of the adapted ASQ to effectively assess the affective styles of concealing, adjusting and tolerating in Dutch-speaking adolescents.

Sex-Specific Associations Between Inter-Individual Differences in Heart Rate Variability and Inter-Individual Differences in Emotion Regulation

“…Our findings regarding sex-differences in self-reported emotion regulation abilities are consistent with those of previous studies revealing more self-reported reappraisal and suppression use in male as compared to female participants (Graser et al, 2012; Erreygers and Spooren, 2017; Totzeck et al, 2018). Moreover, our findings complement findings of other studies indicating that female participants report and show more emotionality than male participants (Grossman and Wood, 1993; Kring and Gordon, 1998; Bradley et al, 2001), implying that sex-differences in emotion regulation may account for sex-differences in emotional sensitivity and emotional expressivity.…”

Sex-Specific Relationships Between Interoceptive Accuracy and Emotion Regulation

“…One of the most striking differences is the differentiation between male and female individuals in the analyses (Füstös et al, 2013;Weiss et al, 2014;Kever et al, 2015), which has only been done in the present study. Sex-differences in interoceptive accuracy and emotion regulation have already been shown in previous studies (Graser et al, 2012;Bornemann and Singer, 2017;Erreygers and Spooren, 2017;Grabauskaitė et al, 2017): Male individuals were more accurate in interoceptive accuracy (Bornemann and Singer, 2017;Grabauskaitė et al, 2017) and more engaged in suppression and reappraisal for emotion regulation (Graser et al, 2012;Erreygers and Spooren, 2017) than female individuals. We found similar sex-differences in interoceptive accuracy and emotion regulation in the present study, indicating the need to consider sex-differences when analyzing the FIGURE 1 | Scatterplots with lines of best fit demonstrating the relationship between interoceptive accuracy and reappraisal or suppression among female (white triangles and dashed lines) and male (black triangles and solid lines) individuals.…”

Factor structure and validity of the Affective Style Questionnaire

“…Regardless of the difference in analytical methods (i.e. ordinal vs interval), we found, along with the Japan and Belgium (Erreygers and Spooren, 2017) studies, the following two items were problematic: (1) “I can avoid getting upset by taking a different perspective on things” and (2) “I can tolerate being upset.”…”

“…Erreygers and Spooren (2017) used data from 1601 Flemish adolescents in Belgium. They conducted ESEM with oblique rotation while treating the response choices as ordinal data.…”

“…They found that the three factors correlated with other emotion regulation measures. Erreygers and Spooren (2017) used data from 1601 Flemish adolescents in Belgium. A: adjusting; T: tolerating; C: concealing; H: holding; PCA: principal component analysis; ESEM: exploratory structure equation modeling; EFA: exploratory factor analysis; CFA: confirmatory factor analysis.…”